Granthagar calls it a day

'Book place' would be the simplest and more apt word to describe it, but it was also a mission. Selling books was really a side-business for Nanakbhai Meghani, 80, owner of Granthagar at Gujarat Sahitya Parishad and son of the Gujarati literary stalwart Jhaverchand Meghani.

Nov 10, 2013, 03:05 IST

AHMEDABAD: 'Bookshop' was, in a way, a misnomer for 'Granthagar', which called it a day recently. 'Book place' would be the simplest and more apt word to describe it, but it was also a mission. Selling books was really a side-business for Nanakbhai Meghani, 80, owner of Granthagar at Gujarat Sahitya Parishad and son of the Gujarati literary stalwart Jhaverchand Meghani.
For the past four decades his calling was to act as a connect between the book and the reader. A visitor to the shop was first a reader and then a customer, if at all. This moral code defied the systems of business.

Nanakbhai would be happy to offer a chair and a cup of tea to a customer who read (does not just browse) books for hours, sometimes days on end, as if in a library, and eventually went away. This bookseller would be happier if the reader borrowed the volume with no date of return assured.

This writer had himself borrowed the 'Bookseller from Baghdad' and kept it for a month before eventually buying it. 'Eats, shoots, and goes away', however, was returned after 15 days and happily accepted back.

The freebies at Granthagar would increase with the frequency of visits - biscuits, cookies, candies, homemade delicacies, sharbat, the list was long. All these came from Hansaben, Nanakbhai's assistant, who is nothing less than a daughter to him. Well-informed about books and suave in dealing with visitors, Hansaben had devoted herself to the mission. But for her acumen, Granthagar would have ceased to be a bookshop long ago and would have turned into a library!

Till the end Granthagar was a rendezvous point for the literati of the city, though the number was shrinking. For the bibliophile it was a sanctum sans glamour or glitter. With something of the old world norms and charm, it belonged to the tradition of the classical bookshop - 'Lokmilap' and 'Prasar' in Bhavnagar, the Strand in Mumbai, International Book Depot in Pune, Oak Knoll in Delaware, Marks and Co. Booksellers of Helene Hanff's celebrated epistolary book 84, Charing Cross Road and the like.

There is a long list of academics and researchers who acknowledge the contribution of Granthagar in their making. Yashwant Shukla, Prakash Shah, Niranjan Bhagat, and Bholabhai Patel were regulars here.

Many book-collectors would cherish tales of how Granthagar had got books of their choice, sometimes from across the world, obviously much before online buying began. And it never pressed for money!

In its prime in the seventies and eighties, Granthagar was a major source of knowledge. The universities and premier institutes used to be its clientele. A voracious reader very comfortable in English, Nanakbhai used to cycle in the city and travel across the state with bags loaded with book jackets. He would visit book fairs across the country and abroad. He would write and call booklovers as the titles of their interest arrived, despite knowing that he would get the reader and not the buyer.

Granthagar believed in taking to the reader mostly the scholarly and classical tomes of all disciplines. It shunned the pulp and the popular, the pseudo-spiritual and the motivational. Shady deals with managements or the librarians were a taboo. No wonder Granthagar was not exactly either a profitable venture or a popular shop.

Soaring real estate made it shift from a villa at a vantage point on CG Road, through a couple of less visible places, and eventually to the ground floor of Gujarati Sahitya Parishad, a suitable venue for a bookshop. But it was perhaps too late for the ageing Nanakbhai. The bard was a bookman with three sons in the vocation of books. Like two others, Nanakbhai also lived by his father's words: bookseller potana shaerno gnyanmaali chhe (A bookseller is the cultivator of knowledge for the city). The city, without a book place like Granthagar, would appear slightly less than civilized to many.

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